Amid transportation talks, Jackson criticizes funding

By Ariel Hart and Nancy Badertscher

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

If anyone's accomplishing anything with the legislative push for new transportation funding, it's happening behind the scenes.

A House and Senate committee that is tasked with striking a deal held a spare, hastily announced meeting Thursday. They read important points of the bill aloud, outlined sticking points, and left. The bill they took up Thursday passed the House Transportation Committee more than three weeks ago. They will probably meet again Monday.

While they were speaking to a sparsely attended room at the Capitol -- it is spring break, after all -- Jesse Jackson, who flew in to bemoan the crisis facing Georgia's public transportation, spoke outside with a crowd of activists and state legislators.  He went upstairs to confront the committee, concerned that it contains no Atlantans or Democrats. They were already gone.

All is not lost. Behind closed doors is probably the place where any real deal will be struck. Though just seven working days remain in the session, House and Senate negotiators have said they feel certain they can come to agreement.

"I truly believe we can come to a conclusion this year," Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Jeff Mullis (R-Chickamauga) said Thursday.

The bill in question was first proposed early this year by Gov. Sonny Perdue. It would divide the state into 12 regions and allow each region to hold a referendum to tax itself for a list of transportation projects to be built in the region. It passed the House Transportation Committee, where House members made so many changes that it lost Perdue's support. Even after House members put in the changes they wanted, House leaders didn't even try to put it to a vote on the floor.

So it expired after a crucial deadline, and that bill (HB 1218) is now technically dead. However, the ideas in it have been transferred to a dormant committee under different bill numbers (HB 277 and HR 206).

House and Senate members may well come to an agreement, and they are further along in their negotiations this year than they were last year. Whether their agreement will pass muster with Perdue seems less certain. Perdue and the House seem at this point to be locked down over how much control local governments would have over their inclusion in a regional tax.

But it may not need to.

The dormant committee they revived has the ability to consider not just a new law like the one Perdue proposed, but a constitutional amendment.  That would require a two-thirds vote of each chamber, but no signature from Perdue.

To pass a constitutional amendment, legislative leaders would need the support of Democrats.  They have excluded Democrats from the conference committee, but there may be other things that Democrats want, like support for mass transit.

That's an issue Jackson came to Georgia to talk about Thursday.  He criticized a federal law that gives federal operating funding only to small transit agencies, not ones that serve big towns and cities. He said the conference committee's composition makes it "not as democratic and representative as it needs to be." He called the shutdown of Clayton County's C-Tran and impending cuts at MARTA a crisis, and said he would be planning "mass rallies" for Clayton County.  "The suburban-urban demarcation must be broken," he said.